Introduction

In typical fashion, we love to bring you news of what’s happening before other sites. While everyone seems to be concentrating on the release of the 9800GTX today, the other day we saw a new driver pop up on the NVIDIA press FTP using a new 200 naming scheme.

There is a small piece of information with the driver and it seems that it’s not due to officially make its presence till the 1st of May. The driver is labeled as “Unified Forceware” which if you get stuck into the reading you will discover supports not only all NVIDIA cards but also all current 3000 series cards from AMD!

When you go to install the driver a key is required which was included in the readme. What it seems to us is that NVIDIA will be charging an annual fee for the driver which gives you a key for 12 months worth of drivers. Word also has it that updated drivers will be released no longer than six weeks apart.

The driver is labeled 201.77 and is of course a beta driver as you would expect. The exact file name is 201.77_uniforceware_winvista_32bit_english_beta.zip. In our normal driver preview fashion we will get stuck straight into the performance numbers when compared to older drivers.